Читать книгу A Garden with House Attached - Sarah Warner Brooks, Sarah Warner Brooks - Страница 2

As before our advent at the "Mansion House" the man-of-all-work – after a long administration of its out-door affairs in the soft service of an easily-gratified mistress (the dear "Lady of the Wheeled Chair") had been abstracted from the family circle, the first step in our gardening was to call in the local "Man with the Hoe." This useful personage (let it here be said) was not – like Mr. Markham's terrible hero – "Brother to the ox." His "jaw" and "forehead" were all right, and, owing to the use of a hoe with proper length of handle, "The Weight of the Centuries" had not disturbed the contour of his back. One could not swear that he knew his "Plato" (alas, how few of us do!) and as to "The Swing of the Pleiades," it was not his immediate concern.

His it was, rather, to interest himself with the hoeing and edging of graveled walks, the weeding of kitchen and flower-gardens, the pruning of shrubs and vines, and the "making of two" lilies "grow where but one grew before." And so far from being (like Markham's man) "fraught with menace to the universe" our "Man with the Hoe" – in that small section of it within his immediate radius – was considered a positive blessing! Was it not on his good right arm that we – "the deserving poor" – to whom Providence had apportioned vegetable patches, flower-borders, and bits of lawn with intersecting graveled paths, and denied the luxury of a resident "hired man" – depended for the presentability of our "outdoors"? Poor Millet! one fancies his astonishment at Markham's terrible presentation of his peasant model! Himself of their guild, he painted his brother peasants in all honesty; and being neither pessimist nor anarchist, but working simply from the standpoint of the artist, has so made them immortal.

But to return to our own undertaking – our first task was the dislodgment of the stubborn tangle of persistent thimbleberry vines, sturdy saplings of ash and chestnut, and long-established waxberries. This done, we made, on the south, facing the "king's highway" and near enough to give delight and perfume to the foot-passenger, a brand new flower bed. In the middle of each square of lawn a raised circle, edged with stone, was made for the spring hyacinths and tulips (these to be succeeded later with cannas and bright summer flowers). Relegating the kitchen garden to a less conspicuous place, we prepared the cabbage-patch for our little rose-garden. All this heavy work done – "The Man with the Hoe" was, for the time, discharged.

Our Cambridge home had, for nearly two decades, been the property of one who in the Harvard Botanical Garden had "a friend at court" and had thus found it possible to secure for his grounds many choice shrubs and hardy herbaceous plants. Himself a skilled and enthusiastic horticulturist – after twenty years of painstaking cultivation, his garden close, with its mellow low-lying site and unobstructed southern exposure, had become a miracle of productiveness.

It had not, like the Medford garden, been "laid out." Flowers, fruit, and vegetables, were all in a riotous jumble; yet each the perfection of its kind. The marvel was that one small garden could carry such a load of growth!

Pears, early and late, of the juiciest and sweetest; big yellow quinces, currants, white and red, raspberries, thimbleberries, and blackberries by the bushel! And (crowning glory of all) a huge gravenstein with fruit fair as the famous golden apples tended by the "Daughters of the Evening Star." To this garden, for many years, my good husband had devoted his leisure hours. Two years before our removal to "The Garden with House Attached" he had left us for the far-off Unknown Land; and it was therefore with tender touch that we uprooted the shrubs and plants of his care – together with the flowers that I had tended. The cold frame was full of thrifty seedlings – Primroses, Iceland poppies, and other beauties. In the open, there were Lilies, Peonies – rose-pink and creamy white – big Drummond Phloxes, and Roses ad infinitum– two heaped cartloads in all – carried over by "The Third Son," and before the earliest frost, so well bestowed by his able hands, as to have rooted themselves in the mellow soil of the new garden.

Not one of these succumbed to the perils of transplantation – not even the five-year-old peach tree, whose certain dissolution all had prophesied, but which bravely withstood the risk of removal, and now, each spring, puts on its crown of pink splendor, which duly turns to juicy fruit beneath the sun that shines upon the grave of him whose hand, long years ago, planted its tiny stone.

Later on, we put in the tulip and hyacinth bulbs, and, when at last the entire garden, beneath its warm coverlet of dressing and leaves, composed itself for a long winter nap – like the poet's "goose-woman" – we

"Blessed ourselves, and cursed ourselves,

And rested from our labors."